Nokia's strategy for Windows Phone success: secrecy

It's safe to say that Nokia has been taking a long, hard look at itself and its chief rivals in the mobile space recently, as it prepares to reinvent itself as a Windows Phone 7 campaigner.

And it's come to the conclusion that its best chance of stoking anticipation and desire ahead of its first WinPho release is to follow Apple's ultra-secretive approach and make sure leaks are kept to an absolute minimum.

There's no question that the information lockdown approach has worked well for Apple. While the standard practice when it comes to other upcoming phones has been for prototype shots, spec sheets, roadmaps and all sorts of other info to hit the public domain well before the handset itself appears, each new iPhone release has – with the odd exception – been characterised by just how little we've known about it right up to launch day itself.

And it's an approach Nokia clearly wants to emulate. “The iron shutters are down around development – it’s 'Apple-style' secrecy right now,” a Nokia UK team member told Slashgear last week. “If we can build the same hype around our first Windows Phone as Apple does about iPhone...”

The rest may well be left unsaid, but it remains a big “if”. The secret to building up hype is to base it around a product that the public already has a high level of anticipation for and is likely to continue talking about no matter what you do.

If not, all you're likely to achieve by being secretive is to remove the handset from the public consciousness altogether.

High time...
Nokia's problem (ahem, one of them) has been its leaks and igs premature announcements and promises.
Nokia N8 ACTUALLY sold rather well in q4, but how many more units could they have sold had they not dangled the E7 in front of the publics' collective noses well too soon? Pathetic repeat of 5800 and N97, and N97 and N97 Mini... Dito, the PR2.0 - both S60 5th and S^3 - 'leaked' way too soon...
And lets not go into the Murtazin disaster - giving him prototypes that early into development probably was the dumbest move ever, and they did it twice (at least),

...oh, and it's not gonna save them now.
WP7 has a huge struggle ahead. Even without iOS and Android to compare it to WP7 is pathetic as it is. It needs its very own 'Anna'/PR2.0 - and I reckon it mightn't be enough.
Compare apps that are available across platforms - the wp7 version is inferior every single time. Great looks, fewer features and slower...now, how will that posssibly get better when they introduce multitasking? My 'obsolete' Nokia C7 is faster in every single aspect than my HTC 7 Trophy...And it probably does 4 times as many things if I broke it down...upon launch the Trophy cost 30% more. Go figure.